The Edge f-4

by Catherine Coulter

  I'm lying here, just floating about, and I think of Laura. Laura, who betrayed me. Always Laura.

  I woke up with a start some hours later at the touch of a nurse's hand on my shoulder. I raised my head, looked at her face, and said, "Always Laura. Laura betrayed her."

  She arched her right eyebrow, sleek and black. "Laura? Who's Laura? Are you okay?"

  I looked down at Jilly, silent, pale, her skin nearly translucent. "I'm fine," I said. Who was Laura? I looked up again at the nurse. She was very short, a tiny bird of a woman, and her voice was soft and sweet as a child's. I nodded at her, then looked at Jilly, whose features were barely visible in the dim light from the corridor. Evidently someone had come into the room, seen me asleep on Jilly's hand, and turned off the lights.

  "It's time to turn her over," the nurse said quietly, "and to massage her. Bedsores will come eventually if we don't take care now."

  "Tell me," I said, watching her untie the back of Jilly's hospital gown, "what you know about coma. The doctors spoke to me at some length, but it was difficult to understand exactly what to expect."

  She began to rub thick white cream into Jilly's shoulders and back. "Remember that movie with Steven Sea-gal a while back where he'd been in a coma for seven years, then awakened?"

  I nodded, remembering how much I'd admired Steven Seagal when I was a boy.

  The nurse said, "He had a long beard and he was weak, had to practice to get his strength back, and of course he did. He was jumping around, maiming folk after just a week or so. Well, that's Hollywood.

  Actually, if a person's in a coma for longer than, say, a few days, the risk increases dramatically that something will be seriously wrong when and if the person ever comes out of it. I'm sorry to tell you if you don't know, but all sorts of brain damage is possible-retardation, inability to walk, to talk-any number of dreadful things.

  "Most of the time, people come out of a coma very quickly, and they're usually okay. If Mrs. Bartlett comes out of this in, say, the next day or two, her chances are good that there won't be any terrible damage; but it's very possible there will be some. We just don't know. We make assumptions and predictions based on statistics, but in the end, everyone is different. We can hope and pray, and little else.

  "In Mrs. Bartlett's case, there was no major damage they could see on any of her test results. Actually, she really shouldn't be in a coma at all. That just goes to show that there's so much we don't know about this sort of thing. I'm sorry, Mr. MacDougal, there's nothing else to say about it."

  She'd given me a lot to think about. I fell asleep again my head next to Jilly's hand. I dreamed about Maggie Sheffield. She was screaming that Paul was a bastard and she was going to run him out of Edgerton.

  Chapter Five

  When I drove back into the driveway at 12 Liverpool Street at ten o'clock the following morning, I saw Maggie Sheffield's car parked across the street as it had been the day before, but she wasn't in it.

  I heard her say as I walked quietly into the living room, "Paul, I called the hospital on my way over here.

  Mrs. Himmel told me there was no change. She said that Mac was still with Jilly, had been since last night."

  I heard Paul grunt.

  "Mac spends a lot more time there than you do, Paul. How's that?"

  "Go to hell."

  Paul didn't sound particularly pissed off at such a question, just incredibly tired. Personally, if she'd said that to me, I would have been tempted to slug her. I walked into the living room, a long narrow great room that ran the entire front of the house, facing the ocean. It was all windows across the front; where there had to be walls to hold up the house, they were stark white. Large square white pavers covered the floor, and all the furniture was black. It was a minimalist designer's wet dream-no compromises with kitsch or newspapers or photos anywhere. Just all these clean stark lines that set my teeth on edge. I couldn't imagine cozying up with a good book in here or setting a nice big TV set in the corner and watching football. Actually, I didn't want to be anywhere near this room when I could help it. It was a testament-not to living, but to someone's idea of perfection. Even the paintings, all of the dozen or so abstracts, were made up of paint slashes, primarily black and white, lined up like perfect little soldiers along a long white wall. I couldn't imagine how anyone could live in this sterile space, particularly Jilly. I remembered Jilly's room growing up-bright teal blues and oranges and greens. Of course she'd also had punk-rocker posters on the walls. People changed, but this much? Was this all Paul's doing?

  I said to Maggie, who was seated on a long black leather sofa, a small notebook open on her lap, "Sheriff, I hope you're well." She was wearing her tan uniform, running shoes on her feet. For just an instant, I saw her without the tan uniform, just as she'd been in my dream the night before. Her hair was ruthlessly pulled back, fastened with one of those things that my FBI friend Sherlock called a banana clip.

  Sherlock had a rainbow of colors in her banana clips.

  "Mac," she said, rising. "I'm just fine. How's Jilly?"

  "The same. No change."

  "I'm sorry. How are you feeling?"

  "Fine, no problem."

  "You're looking a lot better, not quite so ready for the grave as yesterday. Come sit down, Mac. I just need to go over a few more things with Paul."

  Paul hadn't stirred. He was seated forward in a black tufted leather chair, his hands clasped between his knees.

  He appeared to be studying a white paver at his feet. "There's a small scratch," he said.

  "Scratch? What scratch?" Maggie asked.

  "There," Paul said. "Right there, in the top right corner. I wonder how that could have happened."

  "Tell you what, Paul," I said, not joking at all, "I'll get a load of newspapers and we can pile them up over the scratch."

  "Yeah, Mac, sure. You're a philistine. You've got a messy, unsophisticated soul. Come join the fun. Let's get this over with. I've got to get back to work."

  "Jilly told me that was why you left Philadelphia and VioTech-you wanted to continue work on this project and they wanted you to stop."

  "That's right."

  "What's the project?" I asked, walking over a black-and-white geometrical carpet to stand by one of the large glass windows that looked out at the ocean.

  "It's all about the fountain of youth. I'm developing a pill that will reverse the aging process."

  "My God, Paul," Maggie said, nearly falling off the sofa, "that's just incredible! Why wouldn't they want you to continue on that? That would be worth not just a fortune, it would be worth the world."

  Paul laughed at her. "Everyone bites big time on that one. Everyone wants youth back." He touched his receding hairline. "I'd rather come up with a pill to regrow hair myself."

  "If Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek is any indication, we still won't have a pill to grow hair even in the twenty-fourth century. You're out of luck, Paul."

  "What are you really working on then, Paul?" I asked.

  "Look, it's privileged information and it's really none of your business, either of you. It's got nothing to do with Jilly. Now please get off my back."

  Maggie sat back down on the sofa and clicked her ballpoint pen. "I want to know what you and Jilly did last Tuesday night. Think back. It's dinnertime. Did you eat in or go out?"

  "For God's sake, Maggie, why do you want to know what we did for dinner?"

  "Did you eat in, Paul?" I asked, still standing in front of the window, my arms crossed over my chest.

  "Yes, we did. We broiled halibut, squeezed on lemon. Jilly made garlic toast. I tossed a spinach salad.

  We ate. I had work to do after dinner. Jilly said she was going to drive around, nothing unusual in that.

  She loved driving the Porsche. She left here about nine o'clock."

  "Rob Morrison said she went over the cliff at about midnight. That's three hours, Paul. That's an awfully long time to drive around."

  "I went to work. I fell asleep at
my desk, even left my computer on. If Jilly came back and left again, I wouldn't know. If she stayed out the full three hours, I wouldn't know that either. All I know is she left at nine." "What was her mood at dinner?" "Maggie, you know Jilly. She's never serious, always joking around. She told me a Viagra joke, I remember that."

  "So what is it you're working on, Paul?" Maggie said. "You want to clone little Paul Bartletts?"

  "No, Maggie, I wouldn't want to clone myself until I figure out how to regrow hair." He looked over at me. "Now you're a possibility. You've got good genes, Mac. The Germans would have approved of you, or the FBI. You interested?"

  "So you put the FBI right in there with the Nazis, do you?" Why was he stonewalling? But how could a drug he was developing have anything to do with Jilly driving over a cliff?

  Paul just shrugged. "Lots of parallels, as I see it."

  I let it go, just shrugged. "Well, maybe I'll consider it three lifetimes from now if I turn real weird, but probably not. So you're saying that during dinner Jilly seemed perfectly normal?"

  "Yes. She ate lightly. She wanted to lose five pounds."

  Maggie said, "Was she taking any weight-loss pills?"

  "Not that I know of. I'll check in the medicine cabinet and see what's there."

  "Okay."

  "Is it true you made love to Jilly every day, Paul?"

  I'd swear that Paul turned red to his receding hairline. "What the hell kind of question is that, Mac? Why is that your business?"

  "In February, Jilly told me about her love life. She'd never spoken so frankly about sex with you before that. Thinking back on it, something was off. She spoke about a number of things, going from one subject to the next, without pause, without emphasis on anything."

  "What did she say, Mac?"

  I looked at Maggie. In that moment, I would have sworn she had more than just a professional interest in what was going on here. Well, why not give her details? I said, "She spoke about her new dress, how Paul made love to her all the time, how she loved her Porsche, and she spoke about a brother and sister, Cal and Cotter Tarcher. Everything she said was in the same tone of voice, almost without emotion.

  Now, in hindsight, it wasn't quite right."

  The doorbell rang.

  Paul jumped to his feet. "Oh, God, what if something's happened to Jilly?"

  He ran out of the living room. Maggie said to me, "I realize you don't want to hear this, Mac, but there was talk. Just maybe it wasn't Paul she was having all that sex with."

  I wanted to punch her. Jilly screwing around? I'd never believe that. Not Jilly. I didn't have time to question Maggie about it before Paul returned to the living room. Standing beside him in the doorway was a small girl- no, a woman-perhaps twenty-five. She had dark brown hair, thick and curly, pulled back with two plastic clips. Her skin was whiter than a pair of my boxer shorts fresh out of the drier. No freckles. She wore glasses with rounded gold frames. She was wearing jeans that were too loose on her and a white shirt, probably a man's, that hung halfway down her legs and was rolled up to her forearms.

  "Hello, Cal," Maggie said, rising slowly. "What brings you here?"

  Good grief. Cal Tarcher, in the flesh. The girl who was going to be jealous of Jilly's new dress. Sister of Cotter, the vicious bully.

  I watched Cal raise her head, look furtively toward Paul, and say, "My father sent me. I'm glad you're here, Maggie. All of you ate invited to our house tomorrow night." She looked toward me. "Are you Jilly's brother?"

  "Yes. I'm Ford MacDougal."

  "I'm Cat Tarcher. Is Jilly all right?"

  "She's still the same. In a coma."

  "I'm so sorry. I went to see her yesterday afternoon. The nurse told me to talk to Jilly, just talk about anything- the weather, the latest Denzel Washington movie-whatever. Anyway, the party. Will all of you come?"

  "Of course we'll come," Paul said, a hint of impatience in his voice. "Your father commands and we struggle to be first in line."

  "It's not like that, Paul," Cal said, without looking at any of us.

  Cal looked over Paul's right shoulder, toward a painting with two long diagonal slashes of stark black paint slapped on dead-white canvas. "We're all very worried about Jilly, Paul. Dad hopes you'll be able to make time and come to our house for at least a little while tomorrow night. He really wants to meet Jilly's brother. Maggie, do you know if Rob is working tomorrow night?"

  "That's a loaded question. What makes you think I know his schedule?"

  Cal Tarcher shrugged. "You're both law officers." "Yeah, right."

  Cal Tarcher was very uncomfortable with this, probably embarrassed. What was going on here? I felt as though I'd been dumped in the middle of a play and I didn't have a clue what the plot was. "I'll call him,"

  Cal said in a low voice. Then she raised her head and looked directly at Maggie. "It's just that he's more likely to come if you ask him. He'll do whatever you ask. You know he doesn't like me. He thinks I'm stupid."

  "Don't be ridiculous, Cal," Paul said. "Rob doesn't dislike anyone. It would take too much mental energy and he's got to conserve all he's got. I'll call him for you, all right?"

  "Thank you, Paul. I'm off to invite Miss Geraldine. She's had a bad cold, but she's better now. I'm taking some homemade coffee cake to her. My father admires her so very much, you know."

  "Beats me why," Paul said. He added to me, "Miss Geraldine Tucker is our mayor and a retired high school math teacher. She also heads up the Edgerton Citizen Coalition, better known as the BITEASS League. Its members range in age from in vitro to ninety-three- that's Mother Marco, who still owns the Union 76 gas station downtown.

  "And no, there's no correlation between the letters and the name of the group. Didn't your dad come up with that, Cal?"

  "It was my mom, actually."

  "Your mother? Elaine?" There was surprise and disbelief in Maggie's voice.

  "Why, yes," Cal said. "My mom's got a great sense of humor. She's also very smart. Actually you, Mr.

  MacDougal, are the only one coming who isn't a member of the League."

  I said, "You need to come up with words to fit the letters."

  "People have tried," Paul said. "Is that all, Cal? We're really busy here. Maggie is acting like I'm responsible, like I drove Jilly off that cliff. She's asking all sorts of questions."

  Maggie waved her ballpoint pen at him, before turning back to Cal Tarcher. "Before you go, Cal, did you happen to see Jilly last Tuesday evening?"

  "There was lots of fog that night," Cal said, looking, I thought, at her Bally shoes. "I remember Cotter's date canceling because she didn't want to drive in it."

  "Jilly went over about midnight," I said. "Was there fog then?"

  "No," Maggie said. "It.was nearly gone then." She added, "It's very changeable around here-the fog flits through like a bride's veil or it settles thick as a blanket, then all of a sudden it vanishes. It was like that last Tuesday night. Cotter's date was driving to your house?"

  Cal nodded. She was, I saw, finally making eye contact with me. "Cotter likes his dates to pick him up," she said, seeing my raised eyebrow. "He says it makes women feel powerful if they're the ones driving. If they get annoyed with him they can just drop him off and leave him on the side of the road, no harm done."

  "So did you see Jilly or not?" Maggie asked. She didn't like Cal Tarcher, I thought, looking from one woman to the other. I wondered why. Cal Tarcher seemed perfectly harmless to me, just painfully shy, just the opposite of Maggie, and that was perhaps why she didn't like her. Cal Tarcher made her impatient.

  "Yes, I saw her," Cal said. She took two steps toward the door. It seemed that now she wanted to get out of there. "It was around nine-thirty. She was driving her Porsche down Fifth Avenue, playing her car stereo real loud. I was eating a late dinner at The Edwardian. There were maybe ten, twelve people there. We all got up and went outside to wave to Jilly. She was singing at the top of her lungs."

  "What was she singing?" I aske
d. "Songs from the musical Oklahoma. And laughing. Yes, I remember she was laughing. She shouted at everyone, told them she was going to go serenade all the dead folk in the cemetery. Then she did a U-turn and headed back east on Fifth Avenue."

  "That's what everyone else said, more or less." Maggie added, "The cemetery is just south of the main part of town, really close to the ocean, so it's possible that's what she did. But then, much later, she was driving north up the coast road."

  I remembered that Rob Morrison lived south of town. No, I thought, Jilly wouldn't break her marriage vows, not Jilly. She wanted to have a kid. She wouldn't screw around with anyone else. But I knew I wouldn't be able to leave it alone. I'd have to ask Maggie.

  "Maybe she went to the cemetery and something happened to her," Cal said.

  "Like what?" Maggie said, her words bitten out. "I don't know," Cal said slowly, ducking eye contact with every one of us. "But sometimes you can see odd shadows there, hear things, soft-sounding things.

  The trees whisper to each other, I've always thought. The hemlocks always seem to be crowding in toward the graves. You can imagine that their roots are twisted around a lot of the older caskets, maybe cracking them open, maybe releasing-" Cal shrugged. Then she tried to smile. "No, that's silly, isn't it?"

  "Yes," Maggie said. "Very silly. Dead people don't hold any interest, and that's all there is at the cemetery. Just moldy old bones. Now, Cal, Mac here doesn't know you're an artist and you have flights of fancy. Stop acting weird. You know you're not, really."

  "I still wouldn't want to go there at night," Cal said. "Even if I was drunk. It's a creepy place."

  "Are you saying that Jilly seemed drunk when you saw her at nine-thirty?" I asked.

  Cal was silent. Maggie said, "Nobody else said anything about her being drunk. Just high spirits, Mr. Pete said, and that was just Jilly. I asked the doctors at the hospital after they'd done tests on Jilly. Her blood alcohol level was consistent with a couple of glasses of wine. And the toxicology screen was negative. So forget the drunk thing. Now, Cal, you didn't see her after that?"